Is the Bible provably inerrant?

By DOUG SHAVER
October 2004

Introduction

Evangelical Christians have a package of arguments that are supposed to prove the inerrancy of the Bible. When thoroughly analyzed, though, those arguments ultimately boil down to question-begging. Inerrancy cannot be logically proved without assuming inerrancy.

Now, I am going to stipulate that inerrancy cannot be proved wrong. I believe a cogent argument can be made for rejecting the assumption of inerrancy, but I have yet to find a proof that the assumption of inerrancy leads to an irresolvable contradiction.

The problem is that the resolutions require still more assumptions on top of the initial one. Given those assumptions, though, the contradictions do get resolved. Well, nearly all of them.

However, one does not prove a proposition by demonstrating its consistency with other propositions that are not themselves proven. Absence of contradiction is necessary for a proof, but not sufficient. A sufficient proof requires that the proposition be necessarily implied by premises not in dispute.

Inerrantists have never done this. They have tried, and we're going to see how poorly they have fared.

Among evangelicals, inerrancy tends to be part of a package of related dogmas about the Bible. Not all inerrantists accept the whole package. An apologist who advocates any of them is likely to advocate all, but not necessarily. It is instructive, though, to analyze inerrancy in light of the package. The typical evangelical apologist believes:

  1. The Bible is divinely inspired. In Christian jargon, this means it was "God-breathed." In common English, it means the men who wrote the Bible were by some means instructed or guided by God in their writing. Put another way, the information in the Bible came to the authors by revelation.
  2. The Bible is a complete -- the technical term here is "plenary" -- revelation. Everything that humanity is required to know about God is in it. Whatever knowledge is not in the Bible might be good to know, but it is not necessary knowledge.
  3. The Bible is authoritative. All people are required to believe what is in it and to comply with its instructions. Those who do not will suffer divinely mandated consequences.
  4. The Bible is inerrant, i.e. without error. Every statement within it is, if properly interpreted within its context, a true statement.
  5. The Bible was verbally inspired. A substantial fraction of inerrantists reject this premise, but many believe it. It means that the authors were guided by God not only in the ideas they recorded, but also in the wording of those ideas. According to verbal inspiration, the Bible's authors were in effect God's stenographers.
  6. Only the Bible's original manuscripts, or autographs, were inerrantly inspired. Inerrantists generally accept the existence of copying errors and, in some instances for English versions, translation errors. There are a few Christians who consider the King James Version an inerrant translation of inerrant copies of the autographs, but this dogma is not widely held and this essay will not further address it.

The fundamentalists' case for inerrancy, such as it is, typically includes these arguments:

None of these withstands critical examination.

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